Volunteer Check-In System
A mobile web app that ran check-in for 400+ volunteers across 18 holes of a golf tournament.
Role: Led development
What it replaced: Google Forms and a shared spreadsheet
Date: May 2025
The problem
A tournament runs on volunteers, and volunteers arrive in a burst. Four hundred people show up across a couple of hours, spread over eighteen holes, and every one of them needs to be checked in, assigned, and accounted for.
The old system was a Google Form feeding a spreadsheet. It worked until two people opened it at once, or until someone needed to know, right now, whether hole 14 was short-staffed. By then the spreadsheet was already an hour stale and nobody trusted it.
What I built
A phone-first web app with three views. Volunteers check themselves in. Hole captains see who has arrived at their station and who has not. Organizers get a live count across all eighteen holes, plus CSV export for the post-event report.
The hard part
The constraint was not technical. It was that the users are volunteers standing outside on grass, many of them not interested in software, most of them there for exactly one day. There is no training. There is no support desk. If it takes longer than a few seconds or needs explaining, it fails, and it fails at the worst possible moment.
So the design work was mostly subtraction. No accounts, no passwords, no app to install. Check-in is a link and one tap. Text is large enough to read in direct sun. Every screen answers one question and offers one action.
The other real constraint was connectivity. Cell service on a golf course is unreliable, and a check-in that fails silently is worse than a paper list. Actions queue locally and sync when signal returns, so a volunteer in a dead spot still gets confirmation.
Result
All 400+ volunteers were checked in and tracked in real time. Organizers could see staffing gaps by hole while there was still time to move people, which the spreadsheet never allowed.